Waking early

Waking early – birds rehearse a timeless, formless song. The sky glows greenly above dark roofs and a leafless tree is silhouetted flat and sharp against the clarity. A few small clouds, purplish, hang, dark on the brightening air. An orange streetlight dazzles the eye.

But the light is changing as I write and the clouds have disappeared. Soon this predawn twilight will give way to another mundane Monday. The lucid green is gone already and the black mystery of the unlit world is turning to familiar greys. Forms and depths emerge and the birdsong fades. Have they really stopped singing or is it just that my ears are abdicating to the insistent, overwhelming light?

The sky is almost white now, on its way to blue, and the solid world is more than grey – green leaves and red-pink blossoms announce themselves quietly in small front gardens, colours still muted, but soon they will be vivid, singing in our eyes, as this bit of earth turns, fully to meet the sun.